Cellulant , a Kenyan mobile commerce services provider, has signed a deal to provide digital services to Barclays Africa. The company already powers mobile banking for more than 32 banks in Africa and is reported to have an approximated growing transactions worth around Kshs 10 billion (US $120 Million).

Cellulant will be providing the services to Barclays Africa as part of its ‘One Africa’ strategy”. Through the strategy, Barclays Africa looks to make its customer digital experience – mobile and internet banking as well as ATMs -more convenient for customers across its 12 African countries. Cellulant will help Barclays Africa deploy a new aggregation platform to achieve this end.

Cellulant will also be looking to increase Barclays Africa customer’s activity on its E-channels allowing them to transact with a wide network of merchants across the Barclays Africa and Absa network. The model will be rolled out in phases and will see Cellulant  provide a merchant/bill payment platform as well as a Mobile Network Operator (MNO) aggregator to facilitate mobile commerce solutions’ for Barclays Africa.

The new aggregator platform will be deployed in Ghana, Zambia, Zimbabwe, Egypt, Mauritius, Mozambique, Tanzania, Uganda, Seychelles, Botswana and Kenya. It will allow Barclays Africa users across the Africa to access mobile banking, merchant payments and other banking services on a multi-channelled system.

Barclays Africa believes that making use of Cellulant as an aggregator will also save it time and money by providing real time connectivity to critical third parties and enable applications such as Hello Money, Internet Banking, Mobile Wallet (e.g. MPESA) and airtime top-up on all Barclays Africa e-channels.

Cellulant has deployed mobile commerce services in 10 countries: – Kenya, Nigeria, Ghana, Tanzania, Mauritius, Rwanda, Uganda, Zambia, Botswana, Malawi and now Zimbabwe and Mozambique.

Zantel Tanzania has re-branded its Z-Pesa service. The service is now known as Ezy Pesa, has been upgraded and comes with a new  bill payment module.

Bundled on the Ezy Pesa service is a micro insurance option allowing users to buy daily or monthly insurance premiums. Daily premiums start at KSh150 and a monthly premium of KSh4,500 giving a policy holder cover for up to TSh3 million. The insurance service on Ezy Pesa is  known as Farijika insurance and is provided in partnership with the National Insurance Corporation Tanzania Limited.

The menu options on Ezy Pesa also gives users who are clients of CRDB Bank access to their accounts using their mobile phones.

Zantel was the first mobile phone operator to launch its mobile money service in Tanzania. The Z-pay service never picked up much hence the re-brand and re-launch. Four years since its launch in 2008, Z-Pesa managed to attract only 23,000 registrations with only 500 clients being active customers. Zantel plans to attract over 1000 new clients in the next few weeks and targets one million customers by the end of this year.

Other mobile payment services available to Tanzanian users are; M-Pesa of Vodacom Tanzania, Tigo Pesa by MIC Tanzania, Airtel Money by Airtel Tanzania and now Ezy Pesa by Zantel.

Google has announced a new mobile version of Google Trader in Ghana, Kenya, Nigeria, and Uganda . In a blog post, the search company say that it has ”reorganized the mobile site to reduce clutter and emphasize the most important information”.

Google Trader is now also panning out well on phones with smaller screens, according to the blog post.

YoungAfricaLive (YAL) has finally been launched by Praekelt Foundation and Safaricom. Kenya is the second country in East Africa after Tanzania but third after South Africa also which used to enjoy the mobile community services live. YAL Tanzania was launched on 1 December 2011.

The YoungAfricaLive (YAL) portal gives the youth a platform to speak their minds, through a medium that is accessible, and encourage conversations on topics that impacts their lives positively. The portal is available to users in Kenya through through SafaricomLIVE portal on www.safaricom.com/wap or through http://www.yal.co.ke.

While YoungAfricaLive Tanzania is available free to Vodacom subscribers through http://m.vodacom.co.tz, there is no mention whether it will be available to Kenyans for free. It might not be the case I guess.

A 2005 study showed that 60% of Kenya’s unemployed are under 30, and where UNICEF statistics reveal 20 % of the population live below the international poverty line of US$1.25 per day.  In addition, research published by the World Bank indicates that 6.3% of Kenya’s popular of 40.5 million is HIV positive, many of those young people.

Safaricom’s Director of Corporate Affairs, Nzioka Waita, says;

“This partnership is key to our digital inclusion agenda. We believe that the best way to improve the utility and therefore take-up of the Internet among the youth of Africa and Kenya in particular, is by having relevant content on it and making it accessible to them. Being in the vanguard of the Internet explosion in Kenya, we have the network to deliver YoungAfricaLive’s socially relevant and well-packaged message to as many young Kenyans as possible.”

Gustav Praekelt, founder of the Praekelt Foundation, says;

“To follow-up a very successful launch in Tanzania late last year with YoungAfricaLive:Kenya is a great way to start 2012. We are confident that young Kenyans will embrace the mobile platform with the same passion that their South African and Tanzanian counterparts have and use it to create a community that informs, supports and entertains.”

YAL South Africa, in partnership with Vodacom, has close to 1 million unique users, according to Praekelt Foundation.

Orange Kenya launched its unlimited data bundles last week. There was a disclaimer which the company looked to hide as much as possible. First things first. In the “unlimited data bundles”, Orange is offering an unlimited data bundle for 7 days at Ksh 990 and one for 30 days at Ksh 2,990.

There is a fair usage policy disclaimer which means that if you are a heavy data user, your usage will be limited in quality. That means that if you download or upload more than the threshold set on the network, your download and uploads will be limited to a certain speed. Orange , we have discovered, throttles the data at 64kbps. Now that is EVIL.

Speed tests done in Nairobi over the Orange link shows that when you consistent demand more speeds on the Orange network, your data will be capped at 64Kbps.

When did you last use a 64kbps connection? I tell you that not even yuMobile‘s GPRS network would be so boring. When you have a 3G dongle, it is simply unimaginable that any operator would limit users on their “21.1mbps network” to only 64kbps. That is just about 0.3% of the capacity of their network.

The last time I used a 64Kbps network was in 2003 I think. I really would not expect even the most backward of providers to cap data speeds at 64Kbps, leave alone 128Kbps. The minimum which I will also fight is 512Kbps. It is simply deceiving and I believe that CCK should look on how they measure quality.

I might also have to go to my call that Kenya must have minimum data speeds providers have to deliver to achieve national development goals. 64Kbps is simply dragging Kenya backward.

The second evil thing which Orange Kenya does is simply to steal your data bundle. THIEVERY!! The operator says that all its limited data bundles expires after 30 days. After that period, you will get a grace period of another 30 days. If you don’t renew your data bundles after that, you loose it. PERIOD. The honest thing about this THIEVERY by Orange is that they openly state that they will STEAL your data.

You know that Orange Kenya has capacity to beat any data provider in Kenya hands-down. The only problem is that its managers are so much interested in cosmetic changes than addressing real issues and exploiting heir true potential. Orange Kenya is like a beautiful woman with good education and from a good family who instead of looking for a decent job or harness family resources to better her life, has resorted to prostitution for easy money.

Safaricom has unlimited data bundles offer which is throttled at 512Kbps. Most users want the speed to be capped at 1Mbps. While we understand that unlimited data bundles affect voice quality, it is not fair to boast data speeds of up to 21Mbps but not be able to offer even 10% to the heavy users. While announcing its financial results last year, Safaricom CEO said that only 10% of its mobile data clients brings 85% of the revenue. They are the heaviest data users.

Airtel Kenya is still testing its 3G network (we don’t know if it will ever be launched). It has only 30 days unlimited package at Ksh 3,250 and is still not capping data speeds. They might be avoiding the speed caps because not many users know that Airtel Kenya has a 3G network running in Kisumu, Nairobi and Mombasa and so the traffic on it is not that much.

Safaricom has announced that it will be carrying out M-Pesa upgrade for ten hours on Saturday. The scheduled service will be carried out between 8 pm on Saturday (January 21st) and 6 am on Sunday (January 22nd), the M-PESA service will not be available then.

The upgrade is expected to enhance the M-PESA offering and ensure that the platform continues to deliver more innovative services.

Said Safaricom CEO Bob Collymore, “We wish to thank our customers for their continued support and understanding and assure them that this upgrade is necessary in order to grow the M-PESA service menu and improve overall customer experience.”
He assured customers that all funds and records on the M-PESA remained safe.

For any inquiries or clarifications, customers and agents are advised to call M-PESA customer support on 234 or email M-PESA@safaricom.co.ke

Orange has finally launched the iPhone 4S into the Kenyan market. A statement from Orange Kenya puts the iPhone 4S 16GB model at KSh 74,899, 32GB model at KSh 87,999  and the 64GB model at KSh 101,499. The phones will be available at Orange shops from tomorrow.

Orange has finally launched unlimited internet bundles for its mobile and 3G broadband customers.

The newly launched bundles will see Orange mobile customers enjoy unlimited internet for as low as Ksh 39 daily, Ksh 249 weekly and KSh 990 monthly while the Orange Internet Everywhere 3G modem customers will access unlimited internet for Ksh 990 and Ksh 2990 on a weekly and monthly basis respectively.

The new mobile unlimited internet bundles can be purchased by dialing #123# while the broadband bundles can be purchased from the Orange portal and are subject to a fair user policy.

Orange Internet Everywhere 3G modems are available at all Orange shops and partner outlets countrywide and currently retail at Kshs 1790/-.

Reports appearing in Kenya’s Standard newspaper indicates that the country’s Political Parties Liaison Committee has accused some political party officials of harvesting possible party member details from mobile money dealers.

Since M-Pesa is the most widely used mobile money service in Kenya, its likely to be the most affected by these data crimes. M-Pesa has over 30,000 agents and 15.6 Million users in Kenya. Such number of readily available database is very enticing to interested parties. Some premium rate services providers also holds databases with more than even 5 million personal details including mobile phone numbers.

These databases are always abused by political activists who will find it easy to send political messages during the election campaigns. Some of the messages border on hate. Tracking such messages would not be easy since there are very easy to get web tools which can be used to mask the details of the messages originator.

Kenya Political Parties Act demand that the parties attain a certain membership threshold for them to qualify as participants in the coming general elections. The party officials are looking to go round these regulations by harvesting details of possible members from Premium SMS Services and Mobile Money services dealers.

Political Parties Liaison Committee chairman, Nderitu Gachagua, is reported to have said that they had received complaints about  some officials who were allegedly using the methods to register members to comply with the new Political Parties Act.

The allegations are not surprising looking back at what has been happening and the fact that there are no data privacy laws which will be used to back laws like Political Parties Act. The PPA is a weak regulation which cannot be effectively used to pin down data miners.

Nigeria Newsdesk account tweeted that Nigeria Communication Commission had ordered the operators to shut down BlackBerry Messenger services to prevent the anti-fuel subsidy protesters coordinating their protests and sharing the news about the protest. Blogger Loy Okezie also reported the same on Techloy.

Nigerian Telecom providers ordered to shut down Blackberry Messenger (BBM). #OccupyNigeria #FuelSubsidy

— Nigeria Newsdesk (@NigeriaNewsdesk) January 3, 2012

When I sought comment from RIM officials in Africa, Waldi Wepener, Regional Director for West, East and Central Africa at RIM said, “We do not comment on rumour or speculation.”

Nigeria Communication Commission reverses order to suspend Blackberry Services. #OccupyNigeria #fuelsubsidy

— Nigeria Newsdesk (@NigeriaNewsdesk) January 3, 2012

Nigeria Newsdesk later tweeted that NCC had reversed the order. It was not clear what was contained in the order or when it was issued.

Nigerians have today gone to the street opposing the move by their government to remove fuel subsidy which in turn leads to the rise in fuel cost. Nigeria is the 12th biggest oil producer and 8th largest exporter but the country still suffers major energy crisis which has stagnated the growth of its economy.

yuMobile has today announced the launch of a new service that enables subscribers to make calls paid for by the receiver.

The service dubbed Pay4me-6565, allows yuMobile subscribers with low and even zero balances to request for the person they would like to call to pay for the phone call they are making.

To enjoy the new service, subscribers have to dial 6565 in place of the zero at the beginning of the mobile number they are calling. The recipient will then receive a call requesting him or her to pay for the call, and lastly, after accepting, the call will be connected and charged at an affordable rate of Ksh 3 per minute.

Orange has announced that its Orange Money service is now serving up to 3 million customers in the eight African. The company has also announced in a release that Orange Money has tripled its customer base in the past one year. The service recently launched in Botswana in partnership with the Standard Chartered Bank, and in Cameroon in partnership with the BICEC (BPCE group).

Orange Money allows its customers to open an Orange Money account whether or not they have a bank account. It also allows customers to carry out simple banking operations and transactions in total security.

The three key services offered on Orange Money include:

• money transfers, where users can send money using their phone to any Orange mobile customer in the country;
• payments, giving users an easier way to pay their electricity, water, television or phones bills, as well as providing a simple way to buy mobile phone credit from any location;
• financial services, including solutions facilitating savings and insurance.

Orange has also announced that it is already building a platform which will enable international money transfer in partnership with Western Union.

The service was first launched in Côte d’Ivoire in December 2008 and is now also available in Senegal, Madagascar, Mali, Niger and Kenya, as well as in Botswana and Cameroon. It will soon be launched in Mauritius.

Google is activating around 700k Android devices every single day. Some laud the achievement while a good number of online commentators believe that the growth of Android is declining. Andy Rubin, Google’s SVP of Mobile, tweeted  and posted the stats on his Google Plus profile last night.

This means that some 4,900,000 new Android devices are activated each week and 255,500,000 devices each year. Google’s Eric Schmidt revealed at LeWeb last week that Android activations was at 550,000 devices per day. Rubin tweeted in June that there were 500,000 activations per day and that the figure was increasing by 4.4% per week. In July, in earnings call, Google revealed that there were 550,000 activations per day.

Andy Rubin gave some detail on how the firm defines an ‘activation’ via the Google+ social network.

“For those wondering, we count each device only once (ie, we don’t count re-sold devices), and ‘activations’ means you go into a store, buy a device, put it on the network by subscribing to a wireless service” 

Mobile Number Portability (MNP) was such a great thing Kenyans expected to stop their over dependence on networks which don’t serve their connectivity needs since they feared losing their popular lines. It never solved much. We hear that Porting Access Kenya is going to complain to the new Chief Justice over abuse of court process as the porting case has been left hanging without any dates or specific gag order.

“The blanket order is really bad for the industry”, a source in the industry intimates.

Now according to Pakistan Today, Pakistan has banned Mobile Number Portability because of terrorism fears. In the country, you also have to register your SIM cards. Number Portability is not good for security needs because the moment you switch networks, it is very hard to link lines (owners) with previous SMSes and call logs.

Technically because you are not with a network. So if you commit an offence in Pakistan with your mobile phone, you can be prosecuted under the 1997 Anti-Terrorism Act (ATA). You will have all your voice calls, SMS, MMS and emails monitored 24/7. There are also lists of words that are banned from wireless networks.

Vodacom Tanzania has launched a service which enables its M-Pesa clients to receive money from Western Union worldwide. The service enables M-Pesa users in Tanzania to receive money from 108,000 agents serving in 65 countries with Western Union services. This will enable the M-Pesa clients in Tanzania to withdraw they money from the over 15,000 agents in Tanzania.

Users will not be charged any extra amount to withdraw money received from abroad but will just pay the normal withdrawal charges

Vodacom Managing Director Rene Meza said ;

“We have introduced this service to our clients to give them access of sending and receiving funds even when they are abroad. If your mobile operator works with Western Union using the mobile money transfer service could potentially be like having access to 200 countries and over 435,000 agent locations in your pocket, “he said.

The Western Union would allow anyone to use the mobile money transfer service even if they didn’t have a mobile phone through three ways which were cash to mobile, mobile to cash and mobile to mobile.

The most unfortunate part of this arrangement is that M-Pesa users cannot send money to M-Pesa users in Tanzania, South Africa or Afghanistan but have to go through the likes of Western Union. Very unfortunate.

For more Check http://bit.ly/vViApk

Warid Telecom Uganda has launched its mobile money services. The mobile money landscape in Uganda had previously been dominated by MTN’s MobileMoney with players like Uganda Telecom’s M-Sente and Airtel’s Money (Formerly Zap) playing catchup. The new mobile money services from Warid is called Warid Pesa offering users a chance to convert real money into electronic format and vice-versa.

Some of the services you will get through Warid Pesa are;

• Deposit cash and withdraw cash from any Warid Pesa outlet
• Send e-money to any mobile customer in Uganda who can exchange the Warid Pesa for cash
• Store and save Warid Pesa in your registered Warid Pesa electronic wallet.
• Buy Warid Prepaid airtime from your Warid Pesa, using your mobile phone
• No need for a bank account
• No joining fee
• No monthly charges
• No minimum balance
• Fast and easy to use
• Pay-as-you-use

iPhone usage in Syria has been very much on the rise with many Syrians wanting to identify with the iPhone. Syrian born Abdel-Fattah Jandali was the biological father of the late Apple CEO and iPhone inventor, Steve Jobs. Syria might just be attempting to silence the communications from the anti-Assad protesters or they just believe the latest Wikileaks allegations about US espionage through the iPhone.

A ban notice sent out by the Customs Department of the Syrian Finance Ministry read, “The authorities warn anyone against using the iphone in Syria.”

The ban is enough to get any tourist in Syrian spotting an iPhone arrested.

More: Haaretz

You can now jailbreak your iPhone 4S. The JailbreakiPhone4s website has published a jailbreak/unlock solution that will enable all iPhone owners to free the network restriction and install the Cydia application.The jailbreak service from JailbreakiPhone4s will take you back by around US $19.

The iPhone 4S is one of the most popular smartphones. It has been been easier to acquire the iPhone through contract but the fact that it is locked on network has made it hard to effectively use it. Most of the listed 5.0.1 jailbreak/unlock solutions don’t work are are very temporary. Redmond pie listed such a jailbreak/unlock solution but it expires the moment TMSI is refreshed by the network.

If you have no rush to jailbreak/unlock your iPhone 4S, you can wait for a very free unlock solution which is sure to come. I just tested this and it works out fine for a friend’s phone.

Follow us on Twitter @Techmtaa or Facebook through https://www.facebook.com/TechMtaa1

Safaricom is apologising for the continued outage of M-PESA services that has affected services. Through a statement, Safaricom CEO Bob Collymore said that “the cause of the outage  is yet to be identified but the company’s engineers are working hard to ensure the system is up and services back to normal.”

The outage is said to have started around 1305Hrs and has affected all M-PESA handset transactions meaning that money transfers and other M-PESA services are not going through.

“We wish to apologize to our M-PESA customers due to a system outage that has affected all handset transactions. Our engineers are working hard to ensure that the hitch is fixed and services brought back to normal,” said Collymore.

Bob nevertheless assures all M-PESA customers that their money is safe and services will resume as soon as possible.

All those who thought they could entrench Nokia in the Kenyan market by getting freebies are now realising how they were wrong. Nokia East and Southern Africa management even thought that chest thumping and bravado will make them see the light. It has not worked. They even stole the idea of young Kenyans and thought that because they have money, we should keep quiet. Techmtaa was blunt and now reality is sinking in.

Market is won by innovation, prudent management and consistency in pursuing success. You can use bribery as a shortcut. Ok! Dorothy Ooko left Nokia for Google and now she has some orphans she has to take care of lest they starve. Ken Oyolla who is the General Manager of Nokia East and Southern Africa has confirmed that he is leaving by the end of the year. Meanwhile Nokia’s regional office based in Nairobi will remain like those haunted mansions in UK. Agatha Gikunda is alone there. She was supposed to be doing developer relations but her functions were mostly usurped by the domineering Dorothy Ooko. She single-handedly fought to have new products sent to developers in Kenya and anyone who did not lick her tako well did not have their apps on the featured list.

There is shredding going on. Functions are going to be transferred and Delia Seif and her team in SA will be handling major functions. The only bad thing is that Nokia is loosing its only African General Manager.

I really doubt if Ken and Dorothy’s departure from Nokia is out of their own willingness to look for opportunities elsewhere. I believe that as per this release by Nokia CEO, Stephen Elop, in September, many of the employees were given options to be reassigned, retired or themselves to look for opportunities elsewhere. Those who still have their egos like Ken and Dorothy have chosen to leave.

I was one time Nokia addict. Anyone who worked with me in early 2003 to 2005 will know that I bought every N series to the most primitive Nokia phone available then straight from Finland through Dubai. I used websites like Jackys to shop when none of those who claim to know Nokia here knew even what Nokia stood for. When HTC and iPhone entered the scene, I saw it best to tell Nokia the truth. Nokia never listened. Nokia thought that they could conquer the market by using deception. Now they are bleeding.

I contacted Dorothy sending her 7 pages of mail on why Nokia sucks and should change game. Dorothy thought it was playa hater. I repeated it again and when she replied stupidly I also hit back stupidly (dawa ya moto ni moto). Not even 3 years and she had to jump ship to Google where I doubt she will last ( I will reveal why on another day). Google is so different from Nokia and Dorothy is in an age of bribery, deception and ass kissing. Google has that mentality but on a different angle.

Why is Nokia Downsizing?

Nokia revealed in April its plans to reduce its global work force by 4,000 employees in Europe and Asia by the end of 2012. Africa was not strongly mentioned in the restructuring plans but Africa has never been taken seriously by Nokia

Nokia has failed to delivered innovation. They have continue to sell overpriced products in the market while not researching well on the need of consumers from this market. This has led to Nokia continually losing the Kenyan market footing to Chinese handset makers like Huawei, ZTE and Korean Samsung. The latter is also not in a great position to compete as they continue to overprice key products in the market.

Nokia’s head of communication also targeted the wrong crowd to get the message out their on their products. Dorothy Ooko served her purpose only when she dissed free goodies to desperate wannabe bloggers. She sorrounded herself with media rejects and cyber layabouts whose only claim now is that they are a big crowd of Dorothy Ooko’s orphans. She never sought to have Nokia engage with the hawker in Gikomba, Wheat farmer in Narok, Camel herder in Mandera or Fisherman on Lake Victoria who really needed a working service. She was hanging out with people who did not see it best to tell her the truth. Imagine anyone telling Nokia that N9 is a phone to be taken seriously. Why yet the phone does not win the confidence of a potential buyer over future support and is almost 50% more expensive than Nokia N8 which has better offerings than N9.

Nokia’s promotion of local apps have been done on condition that you have to worship the head of Nokia locally. This has not gone down well and the same complaints were raised by developers in South Africa recently.

Nokia once stole the idea of a Kenyan and when they were asked, Dorothy arrogantly retorted how Nokia coined the idea and will never recognise the IP owner. The case against Nokia is looking bad and to avoid embarrassment, Dorothy had to jump ship.

Fortunes are dwindling and unlike Motorola which left on own volition, Nokia is being pushed out by competition.

Telkom Kenya has today partnered with Equity Bank to launch a VISA pre-paid debit card which is linked to Orange Money accounts. These services are not new since Safaricom has a similar pre-paid card with I&M bank while Airtel Kenya has a similar idea but virtual card in partnership with Standard Chartered Bank and Mastercard.

The pre-paid card will enable Orange Money clients use their card to conduct purchases through thousands of Merchants worldwide as well as easily carry their money around.

The major difference between the Safaricom pre-paid VISA card and Orange pre-paid VISA card is that the latter has a microchip hence more secure than the former. Usage of the Orange pre-paid VISA card will also attract loyalty points rewarded to the holder.

The card will not have restrictions on the maximum or minimum deposits to be held as it is linked to the customer’s personal account, according to Telkom Kenya CEO, Mikhael Ghossein. He added that “the only limit in the transaction will be the amount of money that you have in your account.”

Victor Ndlovu, VISA Country Manager for East Africa says that  Kenya leads the region in the use of plastic cards, with over 7.9 million cards in use while Tanzania and Uganda have 300,000 and 700,000 cards, respectively. Rwanda and Burundi have about 5,000 cards in use.

The Visa network provides global access to over 1.8 million ATMs, 22 million physical merchant outlets and a wide range of online merchants.

Orange Money has reached the threshold of 3 million customers in the eight countries where it is now offered, thus becoming one of the most powerful electronic money services in Africa. Orange say that their Orange Money service “has tripled its customer base in the past year. The service recently launched in two other countries in Africa: in Botswana in partnership with the Standard Chartered Bank, and in Cameroon in partnership with the BICEC.

The service which is exclusive to Orange network, allows mobile phone customers to open an Orange Money account whether or not they have a bank account. The service allows customers to carry out simple banking operations and transactions including;

• Money transfers, where users can send money using their phone to any Orange mobile customer in the country;
• Payments, giving users an easier way to pay their electricity, water, television or phones bills, as well as providing a simple way to buy mobile phone credit from any location;
• Financial services, including solutions facilitating savings and insurance.

Orange has also announced plans to expand the Orange Money to include the possibility of receiving international money transfers through Western Union. The two firms are reported to at advanced stages in their partnership. Safaricom through the M-Pesa service has such an arrangement with Western Union. Through Safaricom, Western Union clients in more than 46 countries can send money to M-Pesa clients in Kenya directly without going through any Western Union agent.

Opera is reporting that eleven new countries including Kenya and Egypt have each surpassed one million monthly Opera Mini users this year. So now there are 22 countries in total with more than one million active Opera Mini users each month. Kenya achieved the fete in June 2011, Egypt in March 2011 while SA achieved the fete in June 2009. Nigeria reached the one million monthly usage in January 2010.

On its periodic State of the Mobile Web, Opera is also reporting that more than 140 million people used Opera Mini last month, with usage growing 83 percent in the last year. As of October 2011 OperaMini usage has doubled eight times since its introduction.

“Opera Mini has gained users in every country, across 2G, 3G and 4G networks, across feature phone and smartphones,” said Lars Boilesen, CEO, Opera Software.

Full List of Countries with more than One Million Monthly Opera Users

In October 2011, Opera Mini users viewed 86 billion pages, up 107 percent year-over-year. Those page views accounted for almost 13 petabytes of data through operator networks.  Due to Opera Mini’s data-crunching compression technology, those petabytes were cut down to just 1,335 terabytes of data. Over the past 12 months, data usage has surged 121percent. For the curious user, just press “help” and choose “data savings” in your Opera Mini browser to see how much data you have saved.

Read the full report: http://www.opera.com/smw/.

Visa has joined the mobile payment fray. The company has today announced that it is enabling its clients to make payments through the M-Pesa system. Clients of Virgin Atlantic would now be able to make payments for tickets, change in reservation fees and upgrades at the same time check for their flight details with the new “tweet bot” a Twitter service.

The new Mpesa service allows the transfer of up to KES 140,000 from one phone number per day and will be available to people in Kenya and other countries (like South Africa and Tanzania) where Mpesa is available.

David Rose, Virgin Atlantic Country Manager for Kenya said, “With the launch of the Mpesa and Twitter services, we are determined in ensuring that customers pay for their air tickets conveniently and efficiently via their mobile phones and also get first hand information on their flight details as a quick, single line tweet will generate an immediate reply.”

Passengers will be required to use the Pay Bill option under Mpesa. The business number assigned to Virgin Atlantic is 672672 (this corresponds to the VS672 flight number that operates from Nairobi to London). Passengers will then be required to input their account number, which is the 6-digit booking reference that comes with every ticket.

Normal Mpesa rates will apply and the airline will not charge any other costs.  Notification and confirmation of payments will be received  once the transaction  has been processed.  Other payment options accepted by Virgin Atlantic are bankers’ cheques, bank transfers, cash payments, credit cards and debit cards.

How to use the airline’s new Twitter flight status checker:

• Just tweet the flight number and departure date to the airline’s new Twitter account @VAAInfo. For example. @VAAInfo VS3 1411
• For the majority of flights, passengers will immediately receive a tweet in return confirming the departure and arrival times. If, like Sydney flights, it’s a multi-leg journey, the tweet requests that travellers include the departure airport.
• Passengers will then receive their flight status in true Virgin style. For example: @RogerFlysalot – Hello gorgeous! The @VirginAtlantic VS3/30Oct left London LHR at 10:50 & is expected in New York JFK at 13:51
• Travellers can also check flights even when they are still up in the air, in which case you’ll get up-to-the-minute flight status
  ADDITIONAL PAYMENT OPTIONS: “Book Now, Pay Later”

Virgin Atlantic passengers currently have the option of making their bookings online. They can select the “Book now, pay later” option  which allows 72 hours to make payment and means that  passengers are not required to give their credit card details at the time of making their bookings.

Airtel Kenya last night sent out a notice to its data clients that it would be ending the uncapped data offerings for 1, 7, 10 and 20 days as it improves on the 3G quality and prepares to launch it officially. This means that Airtel Kenya will only have 30 days unlimited data offering which costs around Ksh 3,250.

Airtel Kenya’s data connection has recently been popular as it still maintained the uncapped data oferrings it had while still running the EDGE network. Airtel is expected to launch 3G network by December 2011 or January 2012 as competition on the data front heats up.

Safaricom currently controls almost 95% of the data market in Kenya and is reported to be building its own fiber network as its agreement with JTL ends. Orange offers uncapped data only on its CDMA network currently while Safaricom has uncapped data offerings but with throttled speeds.

Uncapped data on GSM network have been said to lower the voice quality.